


Safety means something different to us

by JoCarthage



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Past Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Past Domestic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 20:32:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1124078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoCarthage/pseuds/JoCarthage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carol watches Daryl wake up, and sees a history. Warning: mentions of past child abuse and past intimate partner violence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safety means something different to us

**Author's Note:**

> This is mostly a musing on what it means for 2 people who've survived familial violence to build a safe space between them. It's soft and sweet, but it's a one-shot.

Daryl was quiet while he slept. It was a skill children of violent parents cultivated. To keep small. To be less than a lump under whatever assorted of clothes and half-sheets they threw over a king mattress cut in half, found at a garage sale. Daryl had murmured about the nasty-eyed pity his next-door neighbors had when his da started haggling for the stained mattress.

Before Merle had started fighting back, he’d said, they would build shelters out of their two halves, hoping the shelter of its dusty tent would be too much of a hassle for their da to drag them out of. 

It wasn’t, but for the short nights before he started in on them again, it felt as safe as he’d ever slept.

Older, staying with Merle because where else was he going to stay he said with lips twisted thin, he kept quiet. Merle would have a friend, from prison, of his dealer, from around the block, or in the very-very-very short-term, a girlfriend, and he didn’t much like Daryl making his presence known. Daryl would get up quiet in the morning, moving like he was hunting deer in the forrest between the never-unpacked-boxes and mounds colorful take-out bags. He’d move what he could aside with his feet, and stretch his growing legs to get over the rest. 

One morning he’d told the dark around them that he’d just climbed out a window of their ground floor apartment rather than navigate the passed-out bodies on his floor. It would be fine if they stayed passed out, but they did not often. Coke didn’t make for much of a sleep-aid.

It wasn’t like the walkers were any kind of inducement to sleep louder, she thought, to move his body from the protective tuck his arms defaulted to under his body. It wasn’t like there was ever going to be a safe moment again, any time he could learn to sleep without a tension in his back.

Carol thought this through as he slept hunched beside her. She’d heard all the signs of abuse in her rounds with the social workers. She’d seen them in Sophia, she’d seen them in herself. It didn’t break her heart any less to see it is Daryl, but she saw in him a different reaction to it.

She’s grown up trying to make herself into a fold in her sheets, to sleep between the bed and the wall, as a broken token to keep her safe. She’d made herself into camouflage, and tried to teach that skill to Sophia. To be so light that she could be seen through when he was mad. She saw from the marks on Daryl’s back that he’d never perfected that self-erasure. She traced their rough edges. 

He stirred, as she knew he would, but she kept moving. She used the sides of her fingers, still soft, much softer than her worn-out fingertips, touching the marked and unmarked skin with the same memorizing brush. His breath kicked up, the same startled response she still fought off when she awoke to another body, but he controlled it, tried to fake early-morning sleep.

She knew that game, and it was a loop her barely-waking mind kept bringing her into too. She just kept brushing, trusting the smells of the camp, the smaller shape of her hand, the roughness of their army-issue sleeping sacks would tell him where he was. She reached up to curl his nape hair around the white band around her fourth finger. It was long enough to make a loop, but when she pulled it away it uncurled just the same.

She let the softness of sound and light be what woke Daryl up fully, bringing truth to the deeper safety of the moment.


End file.
